LONDON — Imperas Ltd., a young company developing multiprocessing development tools, has announced that it has donated technology for an open-source infrastructure to support developers who want to simulate software running on system-on-chip designs.

Imperas (Thame, England) is providing some high-level processor models, APIs for building platform verification infrastructure and developing behavioral and processor models, and OVPSim, a reference simulator. These will be downloadable for free from an OVP website or from SourceForge, an open-source code repository. The company has also been pitching its approach around the semiconductor and EDA industries and an initial list of about 20 supporters includes Carbon Design Systems Inc., CriticalBlue Ltd., Denali Software Inc., MIPS Technologies Inc. and Tensilica Inc.

OVP is offering models for some ARM and MIPS processor cores and the OpenRISC 1000 royalty-free processor core.

Simon Davidmann, CEO and founder of Imperas, said his company would make its money by providing verification, debug and analysis tools that would work with the open-source infrastructure. "We saw a very fragmented market with point tools that address parts of the problem. Proprietary platform technologies that limit interoperability, or that are too slow for adequate software verification, have dramatically limited the progress of this entire industry," said Davidmann.

The donation is worth $4 million, by Imperas reckoning, and the company will support and manage the OVP website, and will continue to contribute innovation to keep the infrastructure evolving. However, Davidmann predicted that an open-source movement would develop around OVP leading to the donation of more and improved models.